Keep up the pressure on the telcos, Canada Bell Canada has lost their second appeal of the July 2015 decision by the CRTC requiring the opening of fibre networks by Canada's major telcos for wholesale consumption by third party ISPs. The result solidifies Canada's presence amongst the nations embracing Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) and heralds a round of massive changes in …
That Canada once had global leading telecommunications infrastructure. 20 years of incompetent and/or corrupt (I prefer to believe my politicians are corrupt than stupid) we don't even rival the 3rd world.
By the way the 20% of rural Canadians are not in "polar bear and no roads" type places. Most of us are within 100 km of a major city and a few km of a town.
Regardless, we somehow managed to provide almost everybody with electricity and telephone service at a time when infrastructure was build by men with shovels.
Perhaps the politicians were a tad less corrupt, or realized serving the country was important, back then.
"Perhaps the politicians were a tad less corrupt, or realized serving the country was important, back then.
If not corrupt, today, they are definitely 'self-serving' and only care what they have to do to get voted back in at the next election. The idea of doing what is best for the nation seems to have gone out he door around 40 years ago in Oz (don't know about Canada but I think if you look at it it is probably a similar time frame).
If I drive about 10 minutes from my house, I could get fiber connection for a stupid high price that more or less as to include TV and phone and a data cap. At my place, I can barely get DSL from the phone network.
I could get cable, but then I would again be paying almost as much for just the internet as if I took phone and TV as well and have to pay extra for unlimited download.
Now I get DSL from a third party and get no fine when I download too much, just my connection getting downgraded in speed. Still crap, but it's honestly the best deal I could get. And it's not like it's just 1 or 2 houses on the street. It's all tightly packed all the way from the city center to my home.
Sincerely! Maybe if Canada can win, we here in the states might be able to win someday, although I'm not too optimistic about it. The Axis of Evil in charge of our telecomms is just as dedicated to preventing anything like competition and will use lawsuits and whatever else it takes to keep their evil, little Oligopoly on top, providing most of us with the choice of mediocre service for nosebleed prices or crap service for somewhat more affordable prices. Good service for reasonable prices? Dream on.
I live in a major city. My cell phone gets much faster Internet access than my wired house does. The only option for high speed wired Internet where I live is cable via Comcast, and I won't open that Pandora's box of high fees and outages. Fiber? What's that? Not here! There used to be a bright spot in the city here (although not in my neighborhood), a company called SureWest. They gave you fiber to the premises, high speed, great quality and a reasonable rate. And they were building out in my direction, so I had something to look forward to. Then they were bought out by a Comcast clone so prices spiraled up and service plummeted, so back to telecomms business as usual and the death of hope.
Over three acres of forested lakefront, with up to Gb class FTTH.
When the FibreOP crew rolled through several years ago, they were slinging FO cable onto the telephone poles so fast that the safety crew flagmen had given up trying to keep up. The crew were in and out of our km-long 10-house street (!) within a couple hours. Each fiber can reportedly passively span up to 40km, no AC power drop required over that vast span.
Distance isn't the "last mile" bugbear that it used to be. It's just not as big a deal as it used to be. Which is why they're rolling out FibreOP to increasingly rural areas. Some in the downtown cores, with their underground wiring, are still waiting for fiber. They have to make due with ADSL or Cable; poor things...
Too many industry leaders (sic) haven't got the memo. Which is why the telephone company is rolling out FTTH *way* past where the Cable TV stops, telephone company now offering triple play with Television service, and eating the Cable Company's future lunch.
This latest generation of cost efficient FTTH technology changes everything. Many don't realize the implications.
For example, how fast it can be slung onto telephone poles in rural areas.
There's still some residual truth to the problem of rural broadband. But FTTH is now much more practical than one might think.
I'm not denying that it's more practical - BUT the problem (at least here in Ontario) is that there is only one provider of FTTH - Bell - and the FTTH is often bundled with their Fibe TV and data caps (and an introductory price reduction for 3 months or so that jumps by 30-40 per month afterwards)...
Until they are FORCED to allow reselling of FTTH to other providers and unbundling of it from their TV offering, FTTH will not be a viable option and costs will not drop to realistic values....
Except they're not. The telcos have no interest in laying cable to anywhere that isn't full of lots and lots of rich white people. Some resort town filled with rich white people? Okay, they'll plumb a line. And they'll charge a testicle and a half to do it, too.
Town full of poor white people, or indigenous peoples, or immigrants? Hell no. And if they try to run it themselves, the telcos will throw up barrier after barrier after barrier. They're a monopoly, see? And just because they choose not to serve a community doesn't mean they'll let anyone else do it.
With the maritimes in a box - a history of kicking corporations in the junk until they complied had a hand in making things viable there - the rest of the country follows the above model. Pulling fibre may be relatively cheap today, but that doesn't mean the telcos are going to do it, and it sure as hell doesn't mean they'll let anyone else do so.
The backbones need to be opened, and the telco oligopoly needs to be broken. There are no other acceptable alternatives.
>Except they're not. The telcos have no interest in laying cable to anywhere that isn't full of lots and
>lots of rich white people
The telcos will cheerfully lay whatever is necessary to collect from anyone they can gouge. Color other than green doesn't play into it.
Downvoted.
Wrong.
Take the politics out of it and look at this from the "objective" viewpoint of a coldly calculating market sociopath.
In Canada, as in the US, rich white neighborhoods tend to have more money than any other demographic over the period of time necessary to invest in long term infrastructure. Whatever your personal or political beliefs are, the facts show that rich white people only like being around other rich white people and that with very few exceptions mixed neighborhoods will lead to white flight. This leads to a couple of problems.
The biggest issue is that non-whites don't make up a particularly large percentage of the population raking in $100k or more per household. Across all of Canada there might be enough folks who fall into that category to put together a small town, or a couple of decent sized neighborhoods. The problem is that they aren't all in once place; they're scattered about the country in smallish lumps, mostly moving into predominantly rich, white neighborhoods. (Just like any other rich person, regardless of colour is likely to do.)
When a tipping point is reached, the rich white folk take off. The formerly rich white people neighborhood fills up with less rich people (I can't believe I can live here!). Suddenly, the neighborhood you put all the time and money into feeding because it was full of rich people isn't.
Some patch of forest in the middle of nowhere that almost noone has ever heard of and is populated pretty much entirely by rich white people? Gold mine. The chances that "others" - be they poor people or non-whites - reaching the tipping point in that community to trigger the flight of the rich white folk is pretty slim. Great place to invest.
Now, you find Telus or Bell or whomever a neighborhood full of rich non-white people and they'll happily invest there. More so than they would in a rich white person neighborhood because, statistically, the chances of a bunch of rich non-white people block moving out are small.
Again: this is Canada. Not the US. There just aren't enough rich non-white folks out there making up entire towns in the middle of nowhere.
Look, prejudice is bad. Whether it is from companies or individuals. But "ability to pay" is usually determined on predictions of demographics over a 25-30 year timeframe, not "who lives there today". And "ability to pay" is all that matters.
Unfortunately, Canada absolutely is one of those countries where you need to factor in the innate racism of the populace when calculating your demographics over time, because that racism provably impacts demographics over time.
I, personally, would love to deny it out of existence. The kinds of people who make hundreds of millions and/or billions don't.
Hmmm, Trev, I live here too. Well-off doesn't necessarily mean white. Plenty of middle class Asians.
How we Canadians choose to treat First Nations (PC for 'Indian') may not be much to brag about, but otherwise you are injecting a bit too much racial angst and mea culpas into your arguments. Let's stick to the facts, they are damning enough towards the Bells!
You also need to differentiate truly isolated communities, with say 50-60 km to the next _small_ community (your Polar bears) from towns that are underserved but could reasonably well be sped up. You kinda do, but <1M is almost everyone in BC, except for Vancouver/Greater Victoria. Yet, much of the province is reasonably clumped together (say >10k), compared to the truly isolated like say Bella Coola. With goodwill, and minus the telcos' stupid lobbying, 90% are probably coverable. The last 5-10% are gonna be a bitch though.
Also sociopath is a bit of a stretch even towards our telcos. We were stupid enough to give them the regulatory rope to hang us with, they are taking advantage of it. No more, no less. Sociopath implies abnormal behavior as opposed to the predictable behaviour of a rational actor when presented with an opportunity to enrich themself. The truly dumb thing is allowing lobbying to drive so much of politics, be it from unions or corporations. Not an uniquely Canadian trait, unfortunately.
Sorry, but you're wrong.
A) "Middle class" isn't enough to justify running Fibre To The Bush. A household income of $100k, while certainly fitting in the upper end of "middle class", is enough to justify it. That does, however, leave most of "middle class" households not remotely worth the time and effort.
B) A little over 10% of Canada's population is Asian. (That number including all of Asia (including India) and not just pacific Asians.) The overwhelming majority of these individuals live in urban agglomerations of over 1M people. They also are not equally represented amongst households making more than $100k; that is still disproportionately dominated by white people.
Based on your screed, I am going to presume you are from Vancouver. In part because you talk about BC issues, and in part because you seem to believe there "plenty of Asian people". Vancouver being, of course, where individuals of Asian descent are dramatically over represented compared to the rest of Canada's major cities, to say nothing of the smaller towns.
Regarding BC's smaller communities, you couldn't be more wrong. A lot of what I wrote is due to first hand experience that I and others I know well have encountered in trying to get broadband into communities in BC. Mostly communities not too far off the Transcanada, and usually considered to be nice vacation destinations.
The rest is based on efforts here in Alberta, and working with people in Saskatchewan, Ontario, Nunavut, Quebec and the Maritimes. Of those, only SK is really different from the rest.
Lastly, I disagree entirely on your personal take on the work "sociopath". You are, once more, incorrect. A sociopath is an individual possessed of the capability to turn their ability to feel empathy on and off at will*. This is abnormal. Most human beings are unable to stop themselves from feeling empathy.
Normal people are not rational actors in an economic sense. This is one of the very first things that economists are supposed to learn! This is Econ 101 stuff right here!
Human beings don't always do what is objectively "best" for themselves, assuming your only criteria for "best" is greed. We will pass up economic opportunities to care for friends, loved ones and pets, for example. We donate to charities, support social programs like universal health care and even do things like spend hundreds of hours a year updating wikis online. None of which are economically "rational" activities.
The purely economically "rational" actor is a sociopath. No empathy. No remorse. No guilt. No anything that doesn't directly benefit the actor. So yes, the telcos are absolutely acting as model rational actors, but in doing so they are acting like sociopaths.
As for "with telcos' goodwill"...dream on. Never going to happen. They will be forced to behave with some form of compassion at the point of a gun only. It goes into law, and those laws are enforced with guns. Until the day the last appeal is exhausted, they will strip mine our populace for every last bent copper.
Like the unrepentant sociopaths that they are.
*Depending on who writes your definitions, the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is that a sociopath is capable of empathy, but can dismiss it at will, while a psychopath is incapable of empathy at any time. The linguistic validity of this depends entirely on which school of psychology you happen to follow.
Here's a median income chart from stats Canada. By your own logic, pretty much _no_ area should be wired, because almost no metropolitan area in Canada has 100k income. Pretty sure the Alberta ones will drop out next round.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/famil107a-eng.htm
Sociopath, from dictionary. a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.
There is a whole branch of psychology concerned with group-vs-individual behavior, you can start with 'Bystander effect' and work your way up. Bureaucracies do not behave as individuals and confusing the 2 is not productive. Individual empathy or altruism should not be expected from a corporation. Might happen, but don't count on it, it's just not their function. If you hand them over some regulatory capture, of course they'll act on it. So don't.
If you were to say that reserves are underserved in Canada, whether in comms, education, food or many other metrics and if you were to attribute that, at least partially, to racism, then sadly, I would agree. But regarding the rest of the Canadian public, to claim that a telco cares about your skin color rather than your $ is a bit of a stretch.
Basically, you started with very good points, I loved your previous article about the subject. Then you tarnish it with bizarre rants. I assume you know way more than any of us about wiring up communities and you certainly hit a nerve when you criticize our Telcos - we generally hate them. But you are still getting panned on all your posts here. Wonder why?
Stick to the facts, leave your emotions out of it - we, your readers, understand engineering and regulations and you have good points. Leave the Noah Chomsky-ing to the Discovery Channel.
Large urban agglomerations are different; the high density means that risk can be spread out. Also, existing infrastructure keeps the cost per unit the same or lower compared to rural runs for everything but labour...but your get a lot more bang for your buck from urban work than rural work.
Re: sociopathy: you're trying to justify conscienceless behaviour by saying that operating in a group removes the requirement to act like a human. You might believe that to be true, but I think that makes you a fucking monster.
As for the rest, I'm very glad I upset you. You seem to need to be upset. Yes, telcos care what colour your skin is. Every corporation of any size does. They care because the colour of skin, along with other factors (such as where you live) play a role in determining the statistical likelihood of your being a good investment, a likely customer and so forth.
Ultimately, what corporations want is your money. But no corporation of any size invests equally or blindly. They put their money where there is the greatest chance of the highest return, and every conceivable factor that can be plotted and sounded is analyzed in order to ensure that investments are optimal.
Maybe you should learn to disconnect your own political leanings from discussions. Clearly I've touched a nerve by bringing up the fact that corporations - and especially the people who run large ones - don't operate in a socially beneficial, altruistic or even colour-bind manner.
Now I, personally, believe that is deplorable. It is behaviour we, as a nation, ought to regulate against to ensure equality. If you wish to believe otherwise that's your choice. Your morals are you own; you've your own right to them, just as I've a right to think you a monster. I'm content to leave it at that.
If you are, however, going to deny that discrimination as a facet of investment optimization happens, then you're a fool. One who is part of the problem because ignorant attempts to defend the telcos prevents us from collectively addressing the problem.
At the end of the day the hard truth is this: unrestrained market capitalism is prejudiced because it magnifies the extant socioeconomic dichotomies inherent in society. Socioeconomic dichotomies present for the most part due to prejudice.
This magnification of socioeconomic divides reinforces them and in short order we have a feedback loop. Especially when dealing with critical infrastructure such as utilities significant efforts must be applied in order to level the playing field and overcome prejudice and the resulting socioeconomic dichotomies. To date, I am unaware of any society that has found a workable alternative.
It's also been pretty conclusively proven that simply wishing the problem away doesn't work. But you keep right on trying, if you feel that you must.
Cheers.
> I think that makes you a fucking monster.
Fuck you too, Trevor. That's not what I said, if you'd bother reading it correctly. What I was referring to is research that shows that bureaucracies, corporations and groups of people in general tend to dodge moral constraints because it is "no one individual's fault". I didn't say it was right, or desirable, I just said that applying sociopath to a group isn't helpful. And is, in fact, rather stupid, like a good deal of your statements here, except for our common frustration with Telcos and their ability to get their way at everyone else's expense.
But, eh, go ahead if you want to put words in my mouth.
p.s. your lack of politeness here certainly shows I've "struck a nerve" too ;-)
Why would I be polite? Politeness is obfuscation which is orthogonal to accurate communication, which is my sole purpose here.
And labeling organizations of people "sociopaths" absolutely is helpful. It makes it perfectly clear that I don't accept that individuals choosing to work in groups absolves those individuals - or the group - or the requirement to act morally.
What's stupid is the idea that as soon as blame can be shared (or ducked), morality doesn't apply. Equally stupid is every single individual who supports, tolerates, ignores or does not actively resist that concept.
Any society that rewards sociopathic behaviour, in individuals or in organizations, is deeply flawed and required massive change. Period.
TP: "Only about 45 per cent of Canadians live in urban agglomerations of more than one million people. A sizeable 35 per cent of Canadians live in urban areas of less than a million people, many of which have internet connectivity that can be politely described as worse than two cans and some wet string."
The entire PROVINCE of Nova Scotia has about a million people. Dozens and dozens of small town localities in Nova Scotia (for example) have Gb FTTH.
Another example is the tiny province of PEI, population under 150,000. Plenty of FTTH there too.
Don't need a million to sling fiber on poles. If the Telephone Company can enter the triple play market (including TV), then the finances seem to work. Judging by roll out activity.
Author should review this: http://www.bellaliant.ca/fibreop-available-areas
The same goes for New Brunswick and Newfoundland! There is NO data cap and i get 175Mbps to my house, i cant really complain. The towns they reference in the article really are in the middle of nowhere, it is not feasible to offer anything other than DSL, the issue arises in the big cities where everything is buried. The vast sums of money required to bury fibre and offer service are staggering for those urban areas, so i can understand why telco's do not want to have open up that access.
I am aware of Aliant, and the very complicated legal history that allowed that particular oddity to exist. Are you?
Also: the maritimes are tiny. In population, but also in size. Start looking at whether or not you have FTTH in Labrador, eh? Or rural areas in pretty much any other part of the country. (Olds notwithstanding.) Then, where and when it does exist in rural areas, why don't sit down with the groups that put it in place - pretty much never one of the major telcos - and talk to them about backhaul.
They'll use words that are in your translation app.
Is it feasible to ever run fiber up to the remote northern villages - the places that are only accessible via ice roads during the winter? They aren't on electrical grids for the same reason - you can't put up poles or towers in the stuff.
I guess they managed to run pipelines, so it is possible, but probably only because of the billions of dollars traveling over those pipelines each year.
This may be getting off topic, but I think you'd have an issue with just laying fibre on the ground. For one thing, you'd have to lay it in the winter, along the ice roads, then it would be exposed to all that traffic.
You'd need to bury it below the frost line (in some cases under the permafrost line).
Not done much work up north, I see. The ice roads are only needed for the heavy stuff. We have plenty of equipment that will haul less than a tonne of cargo (man + fibre) from A to B.
It's all about having great big huge surface area. They're based on the glacier crawlers that are enormous, but exert so little pressure they can run over your foot. Also good for not screwing up the ecosystems.
And why, exactly, would armoured cable need to be buried? What is going to harm it? This stuff is used to surviving oceans. This includes things like boat anchors and the like. A few caribou and some methane fires aren't really going to irk it much.
And if you did need to somehow bury it? Then bury it when you make the next ice road. Those are semi-permanent structures anyways; the next time they redo the corduroy they can cheerily run some fibre. Hell, we run pipelines all through hell and gone relatively easily; the cost of them is in the environmental assessment and the labour, not the materials.
Muskeg sucks, but it's not the 80s anymore. We have managed to master certain types of year-round travel.
And all of this is before I begin my discussion of the modern hoverbarges. Field tested primarily in Minnesota, these units are beginning to see increasing deployment in Canada's northern reaches. The two big factors that have restricted hoverbarge deployment in the past have been cost per hour to operate and a lack of reliability in the coldest winter months.
The latter issue has been solved by a couple of different companies and the current theory is that if the extraction industries in Canada start to buy into the hoverbarges then the overall costs will go down. A lot of this has to with the fact that the next-gen hoverbarges are using better components than the current LCAC hovercraft most militaries use, and there is an expected convergence resulting in lower component costs, etc. But that's really another discussion entirely...
Ahh Trevor
I think you have gone a little bolshie on us. There is little doubt that the telco monopolies will take advantage of any and all opportunities they can find to profit, and will actively obstruct any other operator intruding on what they consider their rightful turf to be shared with nobody. The earlier comment about the only color they respect is green is right on the button. This is capitalism.
Having said that the underlying technology is accessible and easy for anyone with a little skill to deploy. There are only two significant impediments that the telcos use to screw us all.
1) Right of way access. Getting access to the roads or to pole infrastructure is difficult and is deliberately made as inaccessible as possible.
2) Backbone Peering access. This is the last piece of the monopoly, and the one issue that should be approached as it is one that could be legislated and made mandatory. If ALL holders of an AS or Autonomous System number were forced to peer at all switch closets the whole monopoly structure would cease to exist.
For a rural fiber project I purchased 12 fiber single mode drop line for fifty cents a meter in 4 Km spools. This cable can be ploughed in to a right of way or ditch buried, and for runs of 40 Km can be carried without powered repeaters at speeds up to 100 Gbit per fiber. The largest single cost is the cost of ditching. This is not rocket science, communities and small ISP's can do this and eliminate the telcos, so long as network access is available.
Stop bitching, and get organized, and build it out yourself. You can assume that the telcos will fight you, but if your community is organized you can win. We have in Kaslo BC population 1000 getting 30 megabit symmetric FTTH at $60 a month. You can too. Community based not for profit ISP's are the answer for rural communities. The bigger the center the more politics you have to wade thru, and that is a shame, but the the days of fiber for rural areas is possible.
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